Tuesday, October 24, 2006

...may surprise you in the far reaching effects they can have. Not all that many years ago Australia decided to make it illegal for an Australian to own just about any firearm in that country. If you kept up with this at all, you would realize that the violent crime rates skyrocketed after the firearms ban. Why - well because the bad guys realized that the good guys were now helpless. Violent push in type robberies increased markedly. That though was not all that unexpected. It is something that gun rights advocates have stated, for years, would be a result of bann9ing virtually all private ownership of firearms.

What may be a little more surprising is the increase in such things as vermin. In Australia for instance, there are at least a score of non-native species that cause havoc with the Australian ecosystem. Rabbits are a big problem, they have been for years, so are mice, rats, Marine Toads and others. Hunting these pest species would be one way to help assure that they do not cause as much problems for the environment as they are doing, yet it was not an easy thing to do in Australia because of the gun ban. Without natural predators these pest species boom, so hunting them is a viable method to combating them.

As a matter of fact, the WWF (no not the World Wrestling federation but the World Wildlife federation) is suggesting that Australia allow hunting of rabbits, with an estimated population of 100,000 on one island alone, so as to protect the breeding grounds of Albatross and penguins, see : Rabbits 'destroy' seabird habitat . Even the Australian Greens Party has joined in for the call to cull the rabbits through hunting them. I wonder though, where will Australia get not the hunters, but the hunters who own guns to cull them. Of course, maybe that is why they are expecting the project to cost $7.5 million dollars. This of course is not just for rabbit eradication, but also for rats and mice.

Now I can think of a way to save them big bucks, and that would be to open up rabbit hunting on the island to the public. My guess is that folks would pay for hunting licenses, would buy rifles and shotguns to hunt, would purchase transportation to the remote island and so forth. It would be a boost to the Australian economy and it would help the environment. In addition if done correctly the hunted rabbits could be used in feed the poor programs, or better yet sold to restaurants. Of course the hunters should also be allowed to keep some of them. With 100,000 rabbits, this could be a long time event, at least a few years to eradicate them or cut back their population to the point where it is an easily manageable threat through yearly hunting programs. Yet I guess it cannot be done, if no Australian can own a gun.

If you think this plan foolish, well allow me to point you in this direction: Australia to cull outback camels which is an article wherein the Australian government's planned culling of camels is discussed. of course, when it comes to camels the animal rights groups doth protest, but as far as I can tell they are just as much a pest as are the rabbits. Well anyhow, that is not the point, the point is that culling of these beasts seems to be the answer. Without guns in the hands of each citizen, then culling will prove to be a very expensive proposition, but as I showed above, it need not be.

Heck such programs to have licensed hunters cull problem populations of animals have worked elsewhere with great success. In some places hunters are even offered bounties on those animals they cull. I don't think that would be necessary, but that is another method that works. For instance, this article: Island rabbits killed off for 20p describes how Scotland offers a bounty on problem rabbits. They offer a 20 pence reward or bounty for each rabbit killed. I wonder why do they have to pay folks to hunt rabbits, is it because so few people in Scotland have firearms? Probably!

Now if the government of Australia decided to go it that way, even if all 100,000 rabbits were killed off, they would only pay out about $20,000; a far cry from whatever plan the WWK and The Australian Greens came up with that is estimated will cost $7.5 million dollars! I don't understand why it is that once tree huggers and animal rights activist get involved the price for something that should be cheap, or maybe even benefit the government financially, all of a sudden costs in the millions. Then again, had the anti-gun crowd not taken away the firearms, maybe this problem would never have gotten as big as it did.

Yes, taking away people's guns can have long term effects that may not have been dreamed of before. Of course maybe the island in Australia is so remote, as not to attract hunters who did not know about it; but certainly it did not attract any hunters when no one had guns. Yet, I can assure you, if the Australian government did it right, and allowed its citizens to be armed as we do in the USA, once they publicized it all they would get more than enough hunters willing to travel to that island to help solve the problem; and the government would stand to make money not spend it while doing it all. Hasenpfeffer anyone? Mmmm good….

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